Radicals Rising

Who are Egypt’s hard-line Islamists and what do they want?

Alexandria was once Egypt’s city of outsiders—a center of Hellenic culture that became a Christian capital second only to Rome and the home of a large and thriving Jewish community. It was an outsider, Lawrence Durrell, who wrote the great saga of the city, “The Alexandria Quartet,” one of whose main characters comes there to escape the dull “toothache of English life.” Durrell explored the “tenebrous peninsula shaped like a plane-leaf”—its alleyways, its ruins, and its blend of people and creeds. But, by the time he was writing, in the late nineteen-fifties, this cosmopolitanism was already on the wane, and the Greek, Italian, and Jewish populations were leaving. Now, in the ongoing tumult of the Egyptian revolution, Alexandria is known as a center of religious conservatism. The city, the second-largest in Egypt, is a stronghold of Salafism, a strain of Islamic fundamentalism that emphasizes the original tenets and practices of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions.

Recently, I drove to Agami, a suburb of Alexandria, to visit Ahmed Khalil Khairallah, an emerging Islamist politician who was elected to parliament, in November, on the ticket of the Salafist Nour Party. Agami is only twelve miles from the city center, but getting there can take an hour, along a congested coastal road. Agami looks like much of Egypt after thirty years of Mubarak—neglected and impoverished, with unpaved alleys, cracked façades, and families of cats clawing through piles of garbage.

I met Khairallah in a private primary school, founded by his father, on Agami’s main street. He is in his early thirties, well educated and friendly, with an energetic manner and a big smile. He has a beard in the Salafi style—bushy, with a close-shaved mustache. He was an hour late and arrived overflowing with apologies. He showed my translator and me into his father’s office and brought his chair around from behind the big desk so that we could sit together more equitably. I was dressed conservatively, with long sleeves, but I hadn’t covered my hair. If this bothered him, he didn’t show it. Khairallah comes from a family of wealthy local landowners. His uncles served in parliament under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. “There is more than one street in Agami named Khairallah,” he said.

Khairallah, one of a younger generation of Salafis who are trying to translate a theological creed into a political position, has risen quickly in the Nour Party. A year ago, the Party didn’t even exist; some Salafi preachers had deemed democracy haram—forbidden under Islamic law. But, in the election at the end of last year, it won twenty-five per cent of the vote. The election, the first free parliamentary ballot in more than sixty years, delivered a clear mandate, with seventy per cent of the seats won by Islamists. (The liberal Egyptian Bloc won less than seven per cent—only thirty-five of the five hundred and eight parliamentary seats.) Among the Islamists, the most powerful entity is still the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, which, with forty-two per cent of the seats, is by far the largest party in parliament. Its electoral success was no surprise: founded in 1928, it has been prominent in Egyptian political life for decades, despite having been banned for much of its existence, and it has an established national network of social and political initiatives. The success of the less well organized, more extremist Nour Party, however, surprised everyone.

At the end of May, Egyptians will return to the polls, to elect a President. In recent weeks, the Presidential race has been chaotic, even by the formidable standards of Egypt’s transitional politics, with prominent candidates entering the race at the last minute and many candidates being declared ineligible to run. Until very recently, the Muslim Brotherhood had said that it would not field any candidate, apparently in an effort to allay fears about its burgeoning influence. In the absence of a Brotherhood candidate, the campaign of Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a Salafi populist, flourished. Then, in the last week before the deadline for nominations, the Brotherhood reneged on its promise and announced the candidacy of Khairat el-Shater, a veteran movement strongman; Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s intelligence chief, also announced his candidacy. At the same time, it turned out that Abu Ismail might be ineligible, because his mother had American citizenship. Eventually, all three were disqualified on various grounds.

Of the remaining candidates, the front-runners are another Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed el-Morsi; the moderate Islamist Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh; and Amre Moussa, a mild centrist. Morsi has almost no public profile, but he will be able to rally the Brotherhood vote. Fotouh, who was expelled from the Brotherhood last year when he decided to run for President, is a respected doctor and a more independent figure. Moussa, a well-known former diplomat and secretary-general of the Arab League, is bland enough to be palatable to most sides.

Egyptians roll their eyes at the confusion, though there is some solace in the unpredictability, as a reminder that this is the country’s first free Presidential election. One thing seems clear: the Islamist vote, so strong in the parliamentary election, now has the potential to prove decisive.

Khairallah lives in a large, comfortable home in a family compound on the main street of Agami. His money comes from his family’s landholdings and businesses, including the school. He told me that his father funded his electoral campaign. Khairallah’s father is an observant Muslim, but not a Salafi, and he was furious when Khairallah, at university, decided to become one. “He said, ‘This will be the biggest mistake of your life,’ ” Khairallah told me. At the time, Egypt was home to several strains of violent jihadist fundamentalism, and, thanks in part to the state media, people assumed that a big beard was the sign of a terrorist. “Once, I was walking in a market and met a friend,” Khairallah recalled. “He said, ‘Hey, Mr. Sheikh! Please don’t go boom!’ ”

Khairallah’s father worried that his son’s decision would expose the whole family to the scrutiny of Mubarak’s state security apparatus. After Khairallah graduated and started working in the school, security officials called his father, asking, “What are you doing? Turning the school into Afghanistan?” Khairallah was called into the state security offices several times, but was never arrested. He thinks that family connections kept him safe. Other Salafis I talked to described harassment: detentions, interrogations, long interviews at the airport whenever they travelled.

I asked Khairallah why he had become a Salafi. “It was nothing dramatic,” he said. “It was just gradual.” He started talking to the people he met in mosques, and there were many Salafi scholars there to learn from. Alexandria’s distance from the central apparatus of the Mubarak regime, in Cairo, had enabled Salafism to flourish. He spoke enthusiastically of Mohamed Ismail al-Muqaddam, one of the most influential scholars. “A meeting with him is worth a meeting with a hundred others,” he told me. “He taught all Egyptians about Salafism.” Khairallah said that Salafism as taught by the Alexandria school was about setting an example. He explained that his teacher, a pupil of Muqaddam, paid attention to the tiniest details of personal presentation: “If my fingernails were long, he would tell me to cut them. He looked at the way I sat. He noticed how my clothes fit. I used to learn from these practical situations even more than from books.”

The emphasis on learning by emulation is a key element of the Salafi concept of dawa, or “calling.” The term Salafi comes from salaf, which means ancestors or predecessors, and refers to Muhammad and his companions and the generations of Muslims immediately following. Egyptian Salafis believe that society can be regenerated by a return to strict Islamic values. Their image, as morally upstanding and untainted by dealings with Mubarak’s corrupt state, was an important factor in their success at the polls.

As Khairallah and I were talking, his father came in, a handsome older man, clean-shaven, with dyed black hair. The father took a prayer mat, laid it out at the other end of the room, and began to pray. “This is the point of our Salafi beliefs,” Khairallah said, pointing to his father. “It does not isolate you from people. Your father might not be a Salafi, but being a Salafi is not about the beard—it begins through the mind.”

In the past months, I’ve met many Salafis, some active in the Nour Party, others independent. All of them were disarmingly friendly. They were almost always late for meetings, but they always made sure that I had something to drink, and they took me to their homes and fed me. Twice, wives of Nour Party officials gave me presents. Salafi men don’t shake a woman’s hand, and some of them tried to avoid looking at me directly. One or two tried to start a discussion of my religious views, but most did not. Khairallah told me more than once that he believed the biggest challenge facing Salafis was their image. Those I met were eager to communicate an image of peaceful conservatism and plainspoken honesty.

The openness of Salafis contrasts with the more guarded Muslim Brotherhood, and Salafis are keen to emphasize this difference. Because it was suppressed for most of its history, the Brotherhood has evolved along secretive lines. Its internal workings are opaque, and it has a tendency to be vague, and even disingenuous, about policy matters. The Brotherhood’s actions are often described as pragmatic, which to Salafis is tantamount to pandering. “We call ourselves dogmatic, not pragmatic!” one senior Nour Party member told me, proudly.

Unlike members of the Brotherhood, Salafis belong to no single organization or hierarchy. A multitude of sheikhs preach to many or to few, and their topics and opinions vary. In conversations with Salafis, I sensed that the purity of the movement’s religious mission had attracted many bright young men who might otherwise have joined the ranks of the Brotherhood. I met Mohammad Tolba, the founder of an organization that tries to bring together Salafis, liberals, and Christians to volunteer in mobile health clinics. The group is called the Costa Salafis, because, Tolba said, “we are the Salafis who like to sit in Costa cafés!” He ordered a cappuccino, and told me that he became interested in Salafism after a friend was killed in a car accident. “Of course, I met the Muslim Brotherhood at the beginning,” he told me. “But I was not convinced at all that this was what I was looking for. I thought, You’re not creating something spiritual. It was football and barbecues, but no religion. It was a shock. I felt fooled, and I became angry and decided to learn by myself and discover.” He met a Salafi by chance at a mosque in 2002. “I didn’t even know the word ‘Salafi’!” So he went home and typed it into a search engine. Online, he found chat rooms that helped to answer some of his questions. “In the Salafi ideology, I found no limitations, no single leader, nothing to stop me exploring,” he said.

Khairallah lamented that journalists had a preconceived notion of what Salafis were like, but he also realized that distrust of them was more general. “We hope that, after we show that we are capable of applying practical solutions, people will be convinced,” he said. “We have to be careful, and that is why we’re giving a lot of interviews.” He once mentioned Japan as an example of a country that had advanced while keeping its traditions and cultural values, and cited as inspirations for the Nour Party Ayatollah Khomeini, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Theodor Herzl.

“Are you telling me you admire the founder of Zionism?” I asked, almost teasing him.

“Ah, a speed bump,” he said, making light of it. He said that of course he didn’t admire Israel but that he admired the Israelis’ perseverance in achieving their goals.

“The biggest problem we’re facing is credibility and trust,” he told me. “We are trying to be among people and to speak with their voice.” At the end of the interview, he pointed to his cell phone. “You see! Eighty-eight missed calls just since we have been sitting here. And all of them from ordinary citizens.”

When the newly elected Egyptian parliament convened for the first time, in January, Egyptians watched the spectacle unfold on television. The Islamist majority was immediately evident from the prevalence of prayer-callused foreheads, a sign of devotion, and of beards—the Salafis’ bushy beards and the Muslim Brotherhood’s trimmed ones. Among the rows of sombre suits were a few clerical robes, a red-and-white checked Bedouin headdress, and the distinctive red fez, wrapped in a white sash, of a scholar from Al Azhar University. A few liberal and leftist M.P.s sat in a bloc, noticeable by the yellow sashes they wore bearing the slogan “No to Military Trials!” Here and there among the five hundred and eight delegates were the women—only twelve of them, including four from the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.

At the first session, members had to swear allegiance to the constitution—a constitution that, paradoxically, they had been elected to help rewrite. A Salafi from Cairo qualified his oath, adding, “if not in contradiction to God’s Sharia.” Many of the other Salafis, including Khairallah, followed suit, adding clauses like “and apply the Sharia of Allah.” The acting speaker of the parliament tried to maintain control: “Please. There is a script we must stick to.” But the new M.P.s were determined to have their say.

I asked Khairallah why he had decided to run for parliament, and he told me that he had been somewhat reluctant to do so. “I don’t really like the whole political thing,” he said. “But I got used to it.” He liked meeting and exchanging views with a variety of people. He hadn’t found it nerve-racking to speak in debates: “A mosque is tougher than parliament.” The parliament, however, has struggled to impress the electorate. The quality of the debates has been poor—the members are given to grandstanding—and very little legislation has passed. The Brotherhood dominates the parliamentary committees and has presented no serious proposals for economic or institutional reform. “It will take time and experience,” Khairallah said stoically. “Mubarak ruined political life.”

The Nour Party is trying to find its footing as a political machine. The first political scandal of the new era involved a Nour Party M.P. who had had a nose job—a vanity frowned upon by the pious—and then lied about it, pretending that his bandages covered wounds from an assault. Khairallah gamely spun the M.P.’s immediate dismissal from the Party as evidence of the Salafi commitment to honesty. But there were other signs of tension between the concerns of the Nour Party’s base and the day-to-day business of its representatives. When I met Nader Bakkar, the Party’s spokesman, he had to break off to do a live phone-in with a TV talk show. The show had two questions for him: what was the Nour Party’s position on American funding for Egypt, and, more urgently, what did he have to say about his presence at Amr Hamzawy’s wedding? Hamzawy, a well-known liberal M.P., had just married a film actress. Photographs of the occasion showed the bride wearing a strapless dress and men and women mingling freely. All day, Bakkar had been explaining his attendance to outraged supporters. He told the TV questioner that he had gone to pay his respects to a colleague and had stayed at the reception only a few moments.

Khairallah spends his weeks travelling between his constituency, in Agami, and the parliament, in Cairo. I met him one morning at the Nour Party headquarters. He was an hour and a half late, delayed by a group of Egyptian journalists, and he had sandwiches sent to my translator and me while we waited. The offices were bare and dusty, but in one room several new Apple computers had been set up, which were to help produce the Party newspaper. We waited in a dingy room, empty except for a Nour Party banner taped over the window and a conference table with cheap office chairs still in their plastic packaging. In a corner, three prayer mats were laid out, pointing in the direction of Mecca. After a while, three men came in to pray.

Khairallah wore a Nour Party pin in his lapel. The day before, in parliament, he had been voting on the makeup of a hundred-member assembly whose job was to redraft the constitution. (A few weeks later, the assembly was suspended, after a legal challenge and objections to the Islamist majority of its members.) Khairallah told me that the Nour Party had been founded mainly in order to influence the new constitution. “We saw that no one was asking to implement Sharia,” he said. The primacy of Sharia principles as the source of legislation is enshrined in a clause of the constitution, but Salafis complain that it has rarely been put into practice.

No one in Egypt has a clear idea of how Sharia law could be applied in a democracy. I asked Muslim Brotherhood politicians, Salafi preachers, Nour Party officials, and activists the same questions: What is the supreme authority in a Muslim country without a dictator—man’s laws or God’s law? Who decides what constitutes Sharia and what does not? Does a parliamentary majority have the final say, or is there a higher authority that should vet legislation? Their answers were mixed with quotes from the Koran, stories of the Prophet’s mercy and tenderness, tangents, non sequiturs, and circumlocutions. Authority, I was variously told, resided with the will of the people, with parliament, with a Higher Council, with a committee of Islamic scholars from Al Azhar University. Salafis told me that they had no problem with the mechanisms of democracy, only to qualify this with talk of limits, boundaries, and “the frame of Sharia.”

After weeks of my asking Khairallah how Sharia could work within the mechanisms of democracy, he eventually said, “Ah, you will never have a full answer to that question.”

When Islamists are talking to Western journalists, they are careful to skip over Sharia’s more brutal strictures, in particular the cutting off of thieves’ hands and the stoning of adulterers. Ahmed Salah, a member of the Nour Party’s Supreme Committee, stressed the rarity of such punishments, and said that mitigating circumstances were taken into account. Still, he affirmed that, as a believer, he could not revise the word of God as expressed in the Koran. In the public sphere, meanwhile, Egyptian Islamists cannot afford to be literal fundamentalists, because they occupy a political space that was opened by a popular revolution, whose demands had to do with social justice and corruption rather than with religion. Salafis realize that there is no precedent or appetite in Egypt for Sharia’s harsher measures, and, like the Brotherhood, they have adopted an incremental approach. Khairallah told me, “We’re building a bridge and walking on it at the same time. The challenges are huge. Moving step by step for us is a religion.”

One Friday in March, I went to Agami to see a new market, set up by the Nour Party, that sells food at cost. A quarter of Egyptians live below the poverty line, and Salafis, in the years before they entered politics, focussed their efforts on building a parallel polity, providing food supplies, education, and medical care in deprived neighborhoods. Waleed Sharaf, a local Nour Party official and an old friend of Khairallah’s, showed me around. In Agami, the Party organizes around twenty stalls each week, staffed by volunteers.

Sharaf and I walked up to a group of housewives, who were shopping under a banner that read, “The Friday of Good Deeds.”

A teacher carrying several bags of macaroni told me that he earns about eighty-five dollars a month. “This market is much cheaper,” he said, and rattled off the prices of potatoes and tomatoes. “As for the meat, anywhere else it is sixty pounds a kilo”—around ten dollars. “Here it is thirty-seven. It helps a lot.”

A housewife in full black niqab spoke of her two daughters and the cost of extra tuition—a common expense, because of the poor quality of public schools. She extolled the Nour Party and the Salafis: “Their doors are always open if you have a problem. My brother went to the Party headquarters needing a job, and they sent him to a company where he now has a job.”

The shopping bags that people carried home all bore the Nour Party logo. Sharaf seemed happy. “These are the simple people,” he said. “These are the people that love us and voted for us.”

The following week, I met Khairallah at a plainly furnished office that he has rented for receiving his constituents in Agami. Parliament has not yet been able to institute much in the way of social programs, and Khairallah helps people by giving them personal donations, as he has always done. They often approach him after prayer, with stories of debt or medical bills or money needed for an operation. One of his assistants, a young man whose long beard hung in two wispy points, helps him assess the needy. “It might even be someone who doesn’t pray,” the assistant told me. “Then they wait outside the mosque for him.” Some might need an operation that costs nine thousand pounds (fifteen hundred dollars). Khairallah might give them three thousand pounds. “Something is better than nothing,” the assistant said with a wan smile. “The sheikh is a wealthy man. Other M.P.s are not able to help people like this.”

While the men, including my translator, went to the mosque to pray, I was taken to Khairallah’s house, where I met his wife. Their children gathered around, practicing their English on me and showing me the games they played on their iPad. When my translator returned, she retreated upstairs and from then on stayed out of sight.

Salafis would like to see a more modest society, which means a more segregated one. In public meetings, I noticed, men and women always sat on opposite sides of an auditorium. “I prefer that my wife stays at home,” Khairallah told me. “It could be different for others, but I have the advantage of being wealthy. She is with the kids, which is important, especially because I am out of the house so much these days.” He said that she was happy, adding, “She loves her home very much.”

I commented that it wouldn’t be possible for every Egyptian woman to stay out of the workforce. “We must look at what would be the best job for any woman,” he said, and mentioned concerns about women leaving work and travelling home late at night.

The issue of personal freedoms is the one with which Salafis have the most difficulty and on which they are most often pressed, on TV talk shows and by their nonfundamentalist friends. Halfway through our first conversation, Khairallah said, with mock relief, “I’m really happy you are not asking about bikinis and alcohol!” But, inevitably, the subject arose. One of the first issues the Salafis took up in parliament was the right of policemen to wear beards, despite an institutional policy against them. For Khairallah, the matter was clear. “This is a personal freedom,” he said.

“So why can’t I wear a bikini on a beach?” I asked. “Isn’t wearing a bikini a personal freedom?”

“I am free within some restrictions,” Khairallah replied carefully. He cited the example of dress codes for airline stewardesses. People accept this restriction, he said. I replied that you could say the same thing about police officers and beards. “People agree to restrictions from an airline,” he said eventually, after more to-and-fro. “Why wouldn’t they agree on a restriction from God?” On the issue of how the rules might apply to non-Muslim visitors, he mentioned the recent banning of new minarets in Switzerland and the niqab in France. “A lot of countries have their own restrictions that suit their customs,” he said.

I said I was more interested in where an alcohol ban would leave Egyptians who simply didn’t agree with his point of view. Plenty of Egyptians, I reminded him, like a bottle of beer from time to time. He shook his head, agreeing, and lamenting this.

“In your own house, Islam says no one should interfere,” he conceded, but all Islamists are adamant that alcohol is proscribed in the Koran and that it should be outlawed in Egypt. (Some would allow tourist enclaves to serve alcohol to foreigners; others would ban even this.) While Khairallah was always careful to maintain that Salafism was about persuasion rather than coercion, there were some things he simply couldn’t countenance. On another occasion, he told me, “Just as some people are worried about their freedoms, others are also worried. I think also of my freedom and my family’s freedom. I don’t want my children to live in a society with alcohol.”

The more I talked to Salafis, the more clearly I saw that, polite and engaging as they usually were, it was very difficult for them to accept the validity of other viewpoints. I asked a Nour Party member in Agami what he thought of me, a foreign woman, with different beliefs. He hesitated, so I said, “I think you think, It is such a shame that she does not know the right path.”

“Yes, exactly,” he said.

He asked me about Christianity. He could not grasp how people could believe that Jesus was the Son of God. To him, it seemed strange to believe in two gods. I explained the theology of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection as best I could. I said that I didn’t truly understand it, either, but that belief was something beyond proof.

Later, I left to wash my hands, and, while I was gone, he said to my translator, “This is simply a disaster, if she doesn’t even know her own beliefs. This is simply a disaster for her.” He pitied me, and something about the sincerity of his pity only made it worse.

Many commentators believe that political experience will mellow the Salafis. I spoke to Ashraf el-Sherif, a young political-science professor at the American University in Cairo, who has studied the democratization of Islamist groups. “The Salafis are really the most dynamic political force,” he said, and pointed out how many compromises they had already made. They had gone from refusing to participate in the political process to forming a party. They had adapted to regulations obliging them to field female candidates—on posters, the women were represented by pictures of flowers instead of head shots—and they had worked to attract women voters. However, Sherif also believes that the Salafis have failed to take on a larger problem, the entrenchment of what he called “the deep state”—the network of bureaucratic institutions, especially the military and the security services, that still run the country. Furthermore, the Salafis have often been distracted by symbolic issues.

I heard a similar complaint from Mohammed Habib, a senior Brotherhood figure who resigned last year. He complained that the Salafis focussed on the wrong things; the obsession with policemen’s beards, he thought, betrayed “a blinkered view.” He went on, “They have never been in politics. They are like kindergarten kids in their first year, but they are evolving fast.”

Habib is now in the process of setting up a moderate Islamic party. I went to see him at his apartment, in one of Cairo’s new, gated suburbs. It was mid-morning, and he was wearing a bathrobe and watching the news. He has a white beard and spectacles, and a kindly professorial air; he is a professor of geology. He told me that he left the Brotherhood because he was appalled by its complicity with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the group of generals who have held de-facto executive powers since Mubarak’s fall. He spoke of conversations between the Brotherhood leadership and the generals that had taken place even while the revolution was first unfolding.

He believed that the Brotherhood had overplayed its hand in the parliamentary election, and that it should have contested fewer seats, allowing more space for liberals and leftists: “This would have created trust and would have helped the system, because everyone would have been raised up, not just the Brotherhood.” Instead, there were now fears of an Islamist takeover, even as the Brotherhood increasingly found itself held responsible by average Egyptians for many of the country’s ongoing problems.

The outcome of the Presidential election is anyone’s guess. And, as the process for rewriting the constitution falters, the question of the relationship among Egypt’s three competing power bases—parliament, the Presidency, and the military council—remains unresolved. “We call it in geology a mélange,” Mohammed Habib told me, laughing ruefully at the chaos. He also used an Egyptian expression for an unappealing mess: “fish and milk and tamarind juice.”

The last time I saw Khairallah, he was in Cairo, in the lobby of an unassuming hotel, where Nour Party officials from Alexandria stay when they are in the capital. He had come from parliament and was about to go into another meeting—one of a series that had stretched over several weeks as the Party tried to figure out whom to endorse amid the multiplying confusions of the Presidential race. He was exhausted, but still expansive. We talked through all the recent plot twists. He felt particularly let down by the news about the American citizenship of Abu Ismail’s mother. We talked about Omar Suleiman’s sudden candidacy, and he laughed. “Omar Suleiman appears to unite all of Egypt!” he said, explaining that hatred for Mubarak’s old crony crossed all party lines. “Amr Hamzawy and I hugged each other today! And people in parliament were saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to Tora prison!’ ” I asked him why he thought the Brotherhood had decided to field a candidate, and he sighed. “There are still blind spots we can’t see,” he said, alluding to the opacity surrounding the move. “We need more time to understand these mysterious areas.”

When I asked him whom the Nour Party would most likely endorse, he politely declined to answer. If Abu Ismail was out of the race, that meant that a large number of Salafi votes would be up for grabs, and that the Nour Party would have an opportunity to play kingmaker. He told me that he admired Fotouh, whom he thought sensible and moderate. However, Fotouh didn’t send out the kind of signals that would excite the Salafi base. His beard wasn’t big enough, for one thing. “He hasn’t yet learned how to bang his hand on the table,” Khairallah said, banging his hand on a table to demonstrate the bearing of a political strongman. “Egyptians think they want someone who knows how to bang his hand on the table.”

I put away my notebook, and Khairallah relaxed. He didn’t seem in a hurry to get to his meeting, and we started to talk about faith and fate. “As a Muslim, I believe that God chooses for Egypt,” he told me. How else could you explain the perfect sequence of events that had led to Mubarak’s fall, except by divine design? I said that just because things happened in a certain way didn’t mean they had to happen that way, but I could not persuade him. “The Egyptian revolution is one of the signs of the existence of God,” he said. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 30, 2012, issue.

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